After the fact

Time to recap my last contractor work. The last project was my third contractor assignment.

• On the first assignment I did good work, swift and professional. My hands weren't tied and I didn't have a boss.
• On the second assignment, I got sick of the bureaucracy in the organization; the highly unprofessional wannabe architecture astronaut; and the frameworks in the tooling.
• On this third last assignment I feel that most were professionals with good understanding of what needed to be done; but they were all pretty stiff. The management on the other hand didn't have a clue on where to go in the future, which is reflected pretty much by their upcoming downfall (remember where you read it first).

I realized that I prefer stiff professionals above incompetent but lively co-workers. I had a pretty good time on this last day-job, even though it was my first maintenance work. It was almost only maintenance as we had no mandate to improve the product! I could only look at this "strategy" with disbelief, mouth gaping. Have you ever heard anything that dumb? The management uses the antithesis of "Get Out of Their Way". Need I say that the employee turnover is humongous?

I knew this before, but Java remains an eyesore for me; and a camel i still a horse designed by a committee. Java need a runtime. Java is verbose. Java is slow. Java comes with environment variables; something called classpath (which resembles system path, but not really); some ugly home-brew .properties files for static settings; a bit of .xml files when you're building some server; a couple of frameworks; a slow and buggy IDE (often Eclipse which is designed by a committee, using plugins built by amateurs); a slow verbose build system, often using plugins from amateurs. Usually, to spice it up, there's some legacy parts that needs to be involved, for instance Java Swing for building GUIs or GWT or JSP for building web.

This is of curse disturbing, but more disturbing is that most co-workers I met when working on Java project don't even know this. In fact, I've not met plenty of seasoned professionals whom have never worked with any language other than Java (perhaps apart from the scant Haskell class in school). If you've never lived in a house, it wouldn't seem preferable to living in a cave. The basic things are there already: walls, roof, security, windbreak.

I'm not saying that it's an option for building enterprise-scale web servers, but using Python you have all of the things you need built right in. 10 lines of code, no extra configuration and you have your minimal web server.

But if you've never seen anything else than hundreds of lines of code and configuration; installation, paths and frameworks; to actually get a web server to square one, well then you're still inside a cave. And you can read all the fact books about caves you like, but you're never going to get out unless you try living in a better place for a while.

I have no new assignment yet, but I actually hope I get to do a bit of web front-end next time. Not because I think it's any good (spoiler: I don't!); I just need some variation. But more than this, I want a job without a boss. It's fantastic and natural to be creative and not held back by strategy/stupidity.

Now it's off to the dentist, then I'll get my hands dirty with level-making for a couple of days.